I'm Sari and I'm Haley and this is Seamwork Radio.

Welcome back to Seamwork Radio where we share practical ideas for building a creative process

so you can sew with intention and joy. So Haley's out on parental leave right now with her new baby. So I'm going to

be flying solo and giving you some really practical tips and tricks. And we've also got a whole

bunch of interviews lined up with some pretty incredible guests from the world of sewing that

you will definitely not want to miss. So stay tuned all summer for that and we'll welcome Haley

back in the fall. And today we're talking about five tips to help you choose the right fabric for your sewing project.

So we're going to cover why choosing the right fabric can be so hard for so many people, what to specifically look for when buying fabric for a project, and how to dramatically improve your fabric shopping skills

in a short amount of time. All right. So I have been teaching sewing and publishing patterns

for over 15 years now, which is pretty incredible for me to think about. And to this day,

one of the biggest challenges that I see for people is choosing the right fabric.

It can be intimidating for a lot of people and we get a ton of questions about it.

There's a lot to know about fabric and it really does take some practice to be able to visualize

what a garment's going to look like once it's finished.

And I think the main issue is that there are a lot of variables when it comes to fabric. So what do I mean by variables? Well, there's how

heavy the fabric is. There's the way it drapes. There's the fiber it's made from. There's even the

color or the print on it. So there's

just a lot of things to consider. And if you think about each garment you make as kind of like

a little scientific experiment, if it were an actual scientific experiment, you'd be testing one variable at a time.

So you'd be seeing how that one thing that you're changing changes things and maybe you even

have a control to test it against.

And then you'd learn something that you could apply to your next experiment.

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